Posts Tagged ‘trust’

Computers. Sometimes you love them, and sometimes you want to smash them with a hammer.

The girls were finishing their Biology course and were supposed to do a presentation via the internet at 7:00pm on Monday night. At 2:00 I thought I’d log onto the v-class to see how to go about presenting slides.

We’d logged onto the class several times before without incident, but this time an innocent little screen popped up: “How do you want to open this type of file (.jnlp)?” It seemed polite enough. I had no idea how loathsome those words would become after 5 hours.

There was a list of apps that I could choose, so I picked Adobe. It didn’t work, so I tried internet explorer. That just took me to a page of gibberish. And worse, I couldn’t change it. Finally I tried a system restore. It took most of an hour, and when my computer came back on, I couldn’t use google chrome at all, and the school website doesn’t support internet explorer.

My computer is a laptop, and at this point I was considering closing it and flinging it like a Frisbee. I might have asked for help in the first place, but here it was 2 hours later, and I was even worse off than when I started. There was no point in asking for help on how to open a “.jnlp file”, when I couldn’t even access the website anymore.

I redid all my updates. Nothing. I re-downloaded Chrome, and it worked, but another 30 minutes had passed.

I downloaded an app suggested by my very helpful computer, but it did nothing. I would have just given up and gone to the library, but the library is closed on Monday. I fretted and stomped and finally hung my head on my arms and shed a few tears.

I’d like to think that being a mom of six kids, I’ve learned some patience along the way—but apparently not. I was completely undone by a computer. I did finally ask for help, but I was too frustrated to think straight, and nothing worked.

Five hours. I vainly fiddled and fussed over this inanimate object for five hours.

I’d sent of dozens of little, “Please help me to get this stupid thing to work” prayers. But I finally asked Kevin and the kids to pray with me, and I gave the situation to God.

It all comes down to surrender. Do I trust God with the outcome? Even if things don’t work out the way I planned? These were the questions I felt probing my heart.

We never did get logged onto that v-class. It was disappointing, but God had a lesson to teach me about computers, faith, and surrender.

By 7:00, my heart was restful. Thankfully, there wasn’t a hammer handy at 5:00. 😉

“ Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”